{"id":1195,"date":"2018-05-05T17:01:03","date_gmt":"2018-05-05T22:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2018\/05\/05\/180505_signs\/"},"modified":"2022-03-06T15:51:55","modified_gmt":"2022-03-06T21:51:55","slug":"180505_signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2018\/05\/05\/180505_signs\/","title":{"rendered":"Signs. And wonders."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p style=\"text-align: center; font-size: smaller;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 8px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/kermittyping.gif\" alt=\"Animation: Kermit the Frog frantically typing\"><br>Me, blogging<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hiya. Happy Cinco de Mayo. I would have written that <i>en espa\u00f1ol<\/i>, but I&#8217;ve been informed by some people with too much time on their hands that it&#8217;s not really a generally-observed Mexican holiday, but only an excuse to eat tacos and guacamole, and drink Coronas and margaritas. To which I respectfully respond: and your point is&#8230;?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, today&#8217;s subject is signs. Also pictograms, which are just signs made by third graders. I have an extensive collection to share with you today, and by &#8220;extensive&#8221; I mean three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My pal Tommy recently bought a tractor, and I drove it. It has cruise control, because when you&#8217;re going three miles per hour, you can&#8217;t be distracted by having to keep your foot on a pedal. Although now that I think about it, I can&#8217;t remember if the throttle was foot-controlled. But I digress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The tractor is covered with pictograms, mostly attempting to describe all the potentially fatal things one can suffer while driving a tractor (of which there are many; the primary purpose of owning a tractor is apparently not to drive it), but mainly succeeding in being unintentionally hilarious. OK, amusing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like this one:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Frankly, I can&#8217;t think of many things a tractor is better suited for than an exciting game of catch using a beach ball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/signs\/tractor1.gif\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s the actual uncropped but much less fun sign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"text-align: center; font-size: 14px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/signs\/tractor1_big.jpg\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 8px;\"><br>I still like &#8220;use this tractor with a beach ball&#8221; better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then there&#8217;s this one, inscribed on a tube affixed to the deck of the tractor and which, frankly, took four of us chronologically adult persons several minutes of collective conjecture before we figured it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/signs\/tractor2.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the life of me, I can&#8217;t imagine why the graphic designer thought that a pictogram instructing the tractor operator to pick up and drink a thermos of coffee, then read a book, and then put the thermos down could possibly <i>ever<\/i> be interpreted as &#8220;open this tube to read the tractor manual.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally, while this isn&#8217;t technically a sign or even a pictogram, it&#8217;s close enough and this is my blog. We recently received a FedEx delivery and apparently our location is still something of a mystery to that company&#8217;s GPS system. Some enterprising logistics specialist determined that the treeware solution was the ideal approach to making sure the package arrived at the indended destination. In this digital age, it&#8217;s nice to know that analog still works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/signs\/fedexboxwithmap.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Me, blogging Hiya. Happy Cinco de Mayo. I would have written that en espa\u00f1ol, but I&#8217;ve been informed by some people with too much time on their hands that it&#8217;s not really a generally-observed Mexican holiday, but only an excuse to eat tacos and guacamole, and drink Coronas and margaritas. To which I respectfully respond:&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2018\/05\/05\/180505_signs\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Signs. And wonders.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-plain-silly","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8112,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions\/8112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}